Intel's former President launches new chip company, Ampere

There's a new chip maker- Ampere Computing on the block led by Intel’s former president Renée James who left the company in 2015 after nearly three decades of service.

Ampere, based in Santa Clara, launched in early 2017 and has nearly 300 people. As she notes, “this isn’t a garage startup.” Ampere's first processor has been sampled. The processor is a custom core ARM v8 64-bit operating at up to 3.3 GHz, 1TB of memory, and a power envelope of 125 watts. Ampere is fabless and expects production in the second half.

The company is backed by private equity giant Carlyle Group, which James joined in 2016 as an operating executive. In a statement, James noted that Ampere is targeting workloads such as artificial intelligence, big data and next-gen data centers.

Ampere’s chips are based on designs from semiconductor company ARM Holdings, which has also recently licensed its computer chip designs to Qualcomm that could help the mobile chip giant create a data center processor competitor to Intel.

James claims Ampere’s server chips are tailored to meet the needs of cloud computing giants like Microsoft (MSFT) that want more energy-efficient processors than what is currently available.